


run faster

by pigeonsarecool



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-01
Updated: 2018-05-01
Packaged: 2019-04-30 11:43:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14496234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pigeonsarecool/pseuds/pigeonsarecool
Summary: Then Hundun makes landfall in Manila, and Kaiceph in Mexico right after, and all of a sudden there's another battle, one that seems intent on snowballing into a full-blown war, and somewhere off the coast of Alaska some crazy motherfucker named Pentecost is wiretapping his own brain into the semi-intelligent neural interface of a three hundred-ton killing machine, probably getting deadly radiation poisoning in the process, and—well.“We have to get in on this,” he says to Lovelace, when the U.N. approval comes through, and she’s already dialing the phone.





	run faster

**Author's Note:**

> 1st chapter is Jacobi's half of the story, 2nd is Lovelace's. That's gonna be up as soon as I, uh, finish it.
> 
> Also, I absolutely butchered the timeline of the Pacific Rim canon, so. Sorry, Guillermo.

 

 

Survival Tip #499: Fortune favors the bold. Capital favors the adaptive. Evolution favors those who can run really, really fast.

— _Pryce & Carter’s Deep Space Survival Procedure and Protocol Manual _

 

He’s with Lovelace the afternoon Trespasser hits San Francisco. They’re in a gay bar, of all places; he’s had four, maybe five drinks, and she’s not faring much better, leaning towards him with the exaggerated import of the deeply intoxicated: “That man,” she says, her face dangerously close to his, “ _shot my fucking head off_.”

“Yeah,” says Jacobi, woozy, “yeah, yeah, yeah, that cold rat bastard,” and Lovelace nods—sometime in the past hour her tight military-style bun’s given way to loose curls that remind him, in the dim light, of Alana; this must be what keeps him loose, keeps him talking—“I’d have followed that sick fuck to the end of the world and back, you know? But she was more than that. I couldn’t forgive that.”

“Well,” says Lovelace, “you did, right? Follow him to the end.”

“I hated him at the end. I wanted to kill him myself.”

“You did some pretty disgusting things for him, though. Awful things. Unforgivable.”

“That’s true,” says Jacobi, slightly cheered, “I did, you know. Do some, like, really crazy shit. For him. It was good.” He signals the bartender for another shot; it’s not like he’s got anywhere to be tonight, or tomorrow, or the next night. Not like being either blackout drunk or ragingly hungover hasn’t become sort of a default state for him, this past month. “I mean, it’s not like they were wasted years. I did great work. I _innovated_. She and I, we were making things—”

“Ways of hurting people.”

“You’re one to talk, Captain Napalm.”

“I did what I had to do,” she says, her voice turning cold, and for a split second he sees the Lovelace he first met, the one they all called _The Captain_ and never _Isabel,_ and just like that he’s trapped inside an airtight container a million miles away with his own screaming face staring back at him through the bull’s eye and she’s shutting off the radio, she’s dropping the gun, she’s saying _I’m sorry, but this isn’t a democracy._ “I didn’t do it because some whiskey-drinking sociopath told me to, and I sure as hell didn’t _enjoy_ it.”

The shots are here. They clink glasses and tip their heads back at the same time. One, two, three, fire. (Daniel Jacobi’s Deep Space Survival Tip #17: When faced with a choice between doing shots and not doing shots, always do the shots.)

He says, “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry he killed you.”

“Oh, please. Like you wouldn’t have done the same if he told you to.”

“That’s true,” says Jacobi, after a brief, contemplative silence, “but _you_ killed _me_.”

“I killed your _clone_. It was the only thing I could do without exposing—”

“So killing _clones_ is okay, but not people? Because boy, have I got some—”

“Fuck off, Jacobi.”

“Okay,” he says, “okay, sorry, okay. Fine.”

She slumps forward on the bar, as if having run abruptly out of energy to stay upright. Jacobi notices, for the first time, the dark circles under her eyes, the sharp jut of her cheekbones. Surely she hadn’t been that thin the last time he saw her? That would’ve been—God, the debriefing, after the ship made its landing and he and Minkowski and Lovelace and what was left of Eiffel were herded into an FBI interrogation room for questioning—it’s all a blur to him now, how they’d put handcuffs on everyone because Lovelace was all strung out on pain meds and kept trying to fight this one cop she swore was an undercover Goddard agent, how Minkowski was trying to hold her back, talk her down, and Jacobi just sat there next to an indifferent Eiffel and watched it all go to shit, thinking, absurdly, that he’d left all his dynamite back on the _Urania_.

In retrospect, he should’ve known they’d both end up here. You can’t take the crazy out of space, and you can’t take the space out of the crazies; so what’s the goddamn point of going _anywhere_? Should’ve just stayed up there, he thinks, until supplies ran out and we all starved to death, and Goddard’s next batch of lab rats found our radioactive skeletons and knew not to go any further. Recreate the experiment with a new group of survivors, unmarred by time and fear and hunger. Let them find a better way home.

“Do you ever think,” he says, “that we were the wrong ones?”

“What?”

“That if it had been another crew—”

“Oh, Jesus. Don’t tell me the great, pragmatic demolitions expert Daniel Jacobi believes in _destiny_.”

“Not destiny,” he says. “More like—cosmos?”

“There’s no such thing,” she says, in the same tone he’s heard her use to explain things to Eiffel, which—stings a little, “as destiny, or fate, or _cosmos_ , or whatever you want to call it. We weren’t _supposed_ to make it back here, but we did, and it was for the better. Now we have to live with it.”

“That’s my point,” he says. “We’re good at living with things. People like us.”

“Speak for yourself, explosions boy,” she says, and that’s when the alarms start to go off.

 

Daniel Jacobi’s Deep Space Survival Tip #304: _Let it come down._

 

There has to be a better word for it than relief. _Excitement_ , that’s worse. _Deliverance_ is just the part of him that feeds off destruction, that’s only ever as good as the devil he’s sold his soul to. Throw the devil out the airlock and you’re left with a shell, with a man who’d welcome anything now that isn’t this particular brand of emptiness he’s been tasting like bile since _she_ died. The sky falls and the roof caves and he’s on his knees in rubble and dust, still drunk on vodka and deliriously high on fear, and the creature catches his eye, he’ll believe it to his dying day, it _spares_ him, that beady yellow eye locks onto his and it’s like staring into the face of God. It does not kill him. Doesn’t even touch him. The sun still hasn’t set; the sky is a bright, unnerving blue, everything thrown into sharp definition. He’s vaguely aware of Lovelace beside him, curled into fetal position, of a man on the other side of the bar lain silent with a beam on his neck, of a child wailing in the building across the street, and he swears he can hear a heartbeat that isn’t his. Boom, boom, boom, ka- _boom_.

 

They’re trapped in that bar for maybe an hour before Trespasser moves up the coast and Jacobi blows up half a city block with matches and hard liquor in an attempt to excavate Lovelace from where she lay trapped under a massive slab of tiled roof. (Daniel Jacobi’s Deep Space Survival Tip #2: In times of need, _anything_ can be made into an explosive device.) “I don’t _need_ you to dig me out,” she snaps, but takes his hand up anyway, climbs with him to the highest vantage point on top of the rubble of a decimated building, and they look out on the leveled city together, eat some packaged trail mix shit from the bar while the sun sets.

“Did you see it?” he asks her. Through some stroke of luck, she isn’t badly injured; the roof had merely bruised her leg, not crushed it completely. All the same, she looks pained and exhausted, watching the helicopters swarming the skyline over the bay. It takes her a while to answer.

“Yeah,” she says. “I saw it. I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

“You’ve seen worse, though,” he says, and she cracks a smile.

“You’ve _done_ worse.”

It isn’t a question. Jacobi shrugs. “I know.”

A silence. The choppers, the ambulances, the distant screaming, these same muted noises for hours now.

“It’s just,” she says finally, “after we landed—I was so prepared—I wasn’t planning to see any of you bastards ever again. I was gonna start sleeping with both eyes shut.”

“Lucky for you,” says Jacobi dryly, “there’s only one of us bastards left. And he doesn’t pose much of a threat.”

She laughs, low and throaty and humorless. “We both know you pose the same threat you always did. I never bought the act, Jacobi. Even—before. You’re not just Kepler’s lapdog, you never were.” Her lip curls. “You’re a monster all on your own.”

Jacobi sighs. Looks up at the sky, which doesn’t appear to be different, but which he knows holds things that make even his infected blood run cold, things whose wills have bent even Lovelace’s iron spine, things so vast and wonderful and terrible their voices alone were worth a bullet in Maxwell’s brain. Things Kepler died for, in the end, finally took his ambition a step too far and got sucked into the void of space, where his corpse most likely floats now, alongside that of the thing that wears Jacobi’s face. A fitting grave, he thinks, the two of them together, until the star gets wise and blows them both to dust.

“I’m touched, Captain,” he says.

 

His old apartment building had been one of the first to go. Once night falls he goes to see what’s left of it, finds the urn that holds Alana’s ashes smashed on the ground, the minimalist furniture she’d helped him buy shattered, dishes he’d used to teach her how to cook crushed, even a framed picture of the two of them that used to hang in the kitchen reduced to smoking shards. Sees the yellow eye of the kaiju in his own mind’s eye and tries to remember he’s luckier than most, but _fuck_ it, it’s nothing but rubble and ruin anyway so he takes a match and a half a tank of kerosene to the nearest caved-in doorframe, watches the whole property go up in smoke. Distantly, he registers the attention of passers-by; maybe they’re too numb, too empty to try and stop him. The fire illuminates everything it shouldn’t have and he thinks maybe he’s just a shitty friend for not holding a service for her first, before the god from the sea got the chance to flatten everything he had that remained of her. Like she’d have wanted anyone but him at her funeral anyway, like he hadn’t spent the past month putting it off because just thinking about talking to a priest about her made him want to puke. _Ashes to ashes, right?_ he says to her ghost, the spectral figure he can see in his mind’s eye whenever he’s on the verge of making a terrible decision, and in his head she agrees with him. _Dust to dust_ , she says. _A monster’s a monster, no matter how how you spin it. There’s nothing you could have done._

 

Here’s the thing they don’t tell you about Maxwell: she really wasn’t that shitty of a person. She’d never killed anyone, not technically; she’d never blown up a building; she’d never set fire to anything that wasn’t a candle or a match or a log behind a grate. Sure, she didn’t have a _problem_ with these things, when Kepler and Jacobi were doing them, but the cool part about robotics—at least the way Jacobi understands it—is that the only collateral damage you run into _personally_ doesn’t even have a heartbeat, only theoretically has a soul. (Sometimes he does wonder if the reason Alana never caused any real damage to the world outside of that lab was that she just didn’t find human beings _interesting_. He and Kepler, they were exceptions; she liked them enough to stick around, but not enough to break into their heads and uncode their DNA into oblivion.) Even on the _Hephaestus_ she never carried a gun. It’s entirely possible she never learned how to use one, or no one ever bothered to teach her, or both. She was her own secret weapon. One faulty line of code and they’d all be dead anyway, suffocated from lack of oxygen or choked to death on on excess of monoxide or crash-landing somewhere in Australia with seven light-years’ worth of collision force, because she who controls the motherboard controls the mission, just not always where it counts. What happened wasn’t her fault, wasn’t Jacobi’s fault, was really only half Kepler’s fault, maybe twelve percent Minkowski’s. It’s just that the Commander’s one fast fucking draw, and Goddard doesn’t bulletproof its pawns any more than it arms its canaries, and there’s only one person alive to this day who can beat Warren Kepler in a game of chess, and that person’s name is not Alana Maxwell.

 

Lovelace, it turns out, is a terrible roommate.

She spends half the night pacing like a prisoner, muttering to herself and smoking cigarettes end-to-end. I thought you didn’t smoke, he says; I _don’t_ , she snaps, but I need something to do with my hands, and she takes up origami at his half-serious suggestion, until her place is nearly wallpapered with strings of tiny paper kaiju. Every morning there are dark circles under her eyes from the nightmares he knows they share, about coming face-to-face with an alien piece of flesh that wears your skin and remembers your childhood, your birth. As much as the idea of it irritates him, he thinks, privately, that he and Lovelace have at least one thing in common: they’re relics, both of them; they’re broken, splintered things, casualties of doing business, the survivor by strength and ingenuity and the last man standing by dumb luck alone.

He’s got no delusions about _that_ , at least. Jacobi isn’t a survivor, not the way the rest of them are, or were; he’s just a person who survived, and even that was mostly by accident. Give him another year or so and maybe he’ll be able to joke about it: _A genius roboticist, a decorated military colonel, and a scheming alcoholic asshole with a decade’s worth of toxic explosive fumes running through his respiratory system walk into a bar. Bartender pulls out a gun with six chambers and one bullet. By sunrise only one of them is left, and it’s not the one with the functional self-preservation instinct._ Somebody up there lost a bet when _Sol_ made landing, he thinks, and somebody else is laughing every time he takes a breath. He’s stranded on the wrong side of a perverted cosmic punchline, the kind of sick joke Kepler would’ve appreciated. (Daniel Jacobi’s Deep Space Survival Tip #56: When your life starts to resemble your superior officer’s sense of humor, initiate mission termination protocol as soon as possible.)

He starts writing them down, now, and while Lovelace is working—she does code work from home, for one of those ubiquitous Bay Area tech startups—blares the first news channel he stumbles on over the radio and sits at her kitchen table with a legal pad and a red pen, memorializing seven years’ worth of near misses in his big, blocky lettering: _Daniel Jacobi’s Deep Space Survival Procedure and Protocol Manual_ , _1st ed_. Somewhere around the one-week mark, Lovelace wanders by on her way out the door, and frowns when she sees the title. _I don’t owe you an explanation_ , Jacobi thinks, except he’s been living on her couch for the past month and a half and she hasn’t said anything about kicking him out yet, so maybe he kind of does.

“It was a joke,” he tells her, “between me and—me and Maxwell. Every time something went wrong, every time something _weird_ happened—which, you can imagine, working for Goddard, was pretty much constantly—we’d come up with a new one. Like, this one time, we got stuck on the _outside_ of a space shuttle—”

“Tip #148,” reads Lovelace, “never trust a faulty motherboard program not to bypass its own auditory simulation codes when on fire.” She looks up, a grin tugging at the corner of her mouth. “You set the shuttle on _fire_?”

“We were trying to trigger the Code Orange protocols,” he says, “because we’d just picked up a signal from—well, that’s not the point. It’s just—”

“Writing them down makes it feel real,” says Lovelace. Surprise must show on his face, because she shrugs and elaborates: “You know, not like—a bad dream, or a mass hallucination, or something.”

“Hardly a _mass_ hallucination,” he says, before he can stop himself, “if we’re the only ones _left_ ,” and feels instantly guilty when she flinches back, as if she’s been slapped.

“Minkowski’s still alive,” Lovelace says, and it’s the first time in a while he’s seen her on the defensive like this. “She remembers. And Hera, too, I think—Minkowski’s trying to get her consciousness into something more portable, so she can, you know, get around.”

“And you know this how?”

“Minkowski told me when I talked to her last week.”

“You talk to Minkowski?” he says, and—is Lovelace _blushing_?

“She’s in Florida. Picking up the pieces, I guess, with the whole—Eiffel situation. He and Hera were always gonna have the worst time of it. I just call every once in a while to check in.”

“ _Do_ you,” says Jacobi, raising an eyebrow, and she shoves him, good-naturedly, the tension broken.

“I’m going for a walk. Don’t blow anything up while I’m gone.” She straightens, knotting her scarf around her neck. “No weird trauma-induced identity crises, either. Those have to wait for me.”

“Have a little faith, Captain,” he says. “And watch out for the sinkholes on Mason. I’m not going to come dig you out again,” and she throws a balled-up glove at his head as she closes the door.

It’s—strange, this thing they have now. They’ve always gotten along well—better than the others did, anyway—and for a while Jacobi thought it was the gay thing, but now he’s thinking it’s more of a _cynical, sarcastic bastard_ thing, and he’s actually kind of delighted by it. He can’t help thinking what an asset she’d have been to SI-5, if Missions hadn’t snapped her up first, but he also knows she’d take it as an insult if he ever told her as much. _I don’t hurt people for a living_ , she’d say. _I don’t hurt anyone unless I’ve got a damn good reason to do so_. How she’s managed to survive two Goddard missions with that kind of attitude still mystifies him.

Since the attack the radio’s been on constantly, and even while she works Lovelace pokes her head out the door every couple of hours to ask for updates. These will range from _Scientists have identified the creature’s possible parent gene_ to _Some woman in Oakland is starting a petition to have public bunkers built in every coastal city in the world_ to _the Pope just tweeted he thinks this is a sign of the end of days_. “Goddamn religious nuts,” grumbles Lovelace, with regards to the last item, “It’s like they really think every little thing that goes wrong in the world is the fucking apocalypse,” and a reasonable person might have pointed out that the leveling of three cities by an unidentified alien creature isn’t exactly a _little thing_ , but Jacobi is not a reasonable person, hasn’t ever been accused of being one, so he says, “Right, like the Pope would make it more than twenty seconds as one of Pryce’s puppets,” and it seems to be the right thing to say, because she just nods and goes back to work, until another hour passes and she comes out again to ask what’s on the news.

Daniel Jacobi’s Deep Space Survival Tip #59: Being able to live with yourself is the key to an effective work-life balance. Do whatever you have to do to preserve this illusion.

It’s _ridiculous_.

He starts cooking for the two of them, which he thinks Lovelace appreciates, somewhere under all the grumbling about how she can cook for _herself_ , thank you very much; he’s always been decent at it, but now he gets better—he experiments a little, and only sets, like, _three_ fires while he’s figuring out the crepe thing, actually takes pictures of his end results to send gloatingly to Maxwell before he remembers. Still. Logically, it should make him miss her _more_ , because he used to do this for her, back in the early days, after he figured out she lived alone and had been sustaining herself exclusively on frozen Indian food from the Costco discount aisle since 2008, but illogically—and he knows this is all him, because what about Maxwell has ever been illogical?—it calms him. “I’m not Maxwell,” Lovelace had said, when he first moved in, “I’m not your weird codependent platonic life partner, so don’t get attached to me that way,” because she’s Lovelace and she’s smart and perceptive and infuriating and she can read him like she reads everyone, like an open fucking book, but he _isn’t_ , he really isn’t, not least because there’s no replacement in the world for Dr. Alana Maxwell: there never has been, he told Lovelace then, and there never will be.

He’s just—not a person who knows how to move forward, without the company of other people. He’s always had Kepler telling him when to push the red button, and Alana telling him when not to. He has, for that matter, always had a button to _push_. Always had a choice between destruction and salvation, even if he never failed to choose the former.

He thinks Lovelace is maybe the same way. That after the mission ended, after Cutter and Pryce were destroyed, after she ensured the survival of herself and her crew, she realized she’d never used this particular mind to think about anything but living to fight her next battle.

Daniel Jacobi’s Deep Space Survival Tip #203: Don’t empathize with the enemy. [That’s Maxwell’s job.] On the day of the battle, await instructions from the outside, and attack from the ground up.

Then Hundun makes landfall in Manila, and Kaiceph in Mexico right after, and all of a sudden there _is_ another battle, one that seems intent on snowballing into a full-blown _war_ , and somewhere off the coast of Alaska some crazy motherfucker named Pentecost is wiretapping his own brain into the semi-intelligent neural interface of a three hundred-ton killing machine, probably getting deadly radiation poisoning in the process, and—well.

“We _have_ to get in on this,” he says to Lovelace, when the U.N. approval comes through, and she’s already dialing the phone.

 

They meet up with Minkowski six months later, in Hong Kong. She looks exactly the same as she did the last time Jacobi saw her, just wearing a different uniform, one that says _PPDC_ in bold white letters across the back; when she sees Lovelace she wraps the other woman in a fierce hug, Lovelace giving in, after a tense moment, to rest her cheek on Minkowski’s shoulder. Jacobi looks away out of politeness, and when he looks back they’re both staring at him.

“Where in the _hell_ ,” says Minkowski, enunciating her words like she’s still giving orders over the _Hephaestus_ loudspeakers, “did you find _him_?”

“It’s a long story, Commander,” says Lovelace. Her hand is still resting on Minkowski’s shoulder. “Come on, let’s go inside. I want to see what you’ve been working on.”

They enter the Hong Kong Shatterdome, the two women in front and Jacobi trailing a step behind, taking in the scope of it, the size, the sheer _nerve_ of what’s been done here, the half-finished jaegers like great hulking watchdogs guarding each wall of the building. They’re skeletons, really, all wires and scaffolding and dinted scrap-metal frames, like the shapes of giants glimpsed through fog, and all Jacobi can think about is how much fun it would’ve been to argue with Alana about this, how he’d have jumped at the first chance he got to build something this massive, this expensive, this _destructive_ , and how she’d have mocked him for it: _Compensating for something, Daniel?_

The truth is he only ever thought seriously about leaving Goddard once, and that was when Kepler—intimated it. It was late; they were in his office; Kepler had just returned, looking somewhat haggard and silently, dangerously furious, from his weekly debriefing with Mr. Cutter. Jacobi liked this side of him—the Kepler who was less _polished_ , somehow, who was closer to the edge of madness and therefore closer to Jacobi, the Kepler whose jokes had an edge of dark nasty purpose to them and whose threats had an undertone of tenderness—and he let this Kepler pour him some whiskey, tried to treat it like the honor Kepler seemed to think it was but ended up knocking it back like a shot, resurfacing to find a pair of narrowed black eyes on him.

“What would you do,” said Warren Kepler, “if I fired you?”

Jacobi shrugged. By then he’d learned to take Kepler’s non-sequiturs in stride; he didn’t understand the man—maybe never would, he thought—but he knew enough to know when he was being tested. And he submitted to it, every time, with that same crooked grin, hands above his head, eyes wide open, missing nothing, daring Kepler to find a fissure, a flaw, a faultline, anywhere. _What do you do with a man with a mind like a bomb and no one to tell him when to light the match?_

“Drink myself to death, probably.” He’d meant it as a joke but it came out sounding unexpectedly, woundedly honest; he backtracked a little. “I mean, I wouldn’t go full supervillain and blow up the White House or something, if that’s what you’re asking. I only do that kind of shit under orders.”

“And if I _ordered_ you to,” said Kepler, with that cruel twist to his mouth, and Jacobi said, “Please.”

Afterwards—after the mission, the _Hephaestus_ , the storm, the gun, the scream, the hostages, the Captain unzipping her body bag from the inside out—he wonders about it. The future is not written in the stars, he thinks; at some point, somewhere along the line, there had been a future for the three of them not yet fallen prey to Goddard’s designs, and he had not recognized it. He’s a man who makes things that break other things, and so, coming face-to-face with the thing that would break _him_ , he had not broken it in turn; instead, fool that he is, that he’s always been, he had leaned a little too hard into its shoulder and let it buy him a drink.

Now, walking the Shatterdome with Minkowski and Lovelace—Alana’s killer and the woman Kepler killed; _she_ would have appreciated that, the awful symmetry of it—he thinks about Alana’s great invisible gods, her children, how she built them bigger and better and stronger and more beautiful than anyone else, and half of it because she was the only one who _dared_ to. He thinks about _Urania_ , the god of the sea, gods and hunters, kaiju and whiskey, about the winter they spent cutting arms deals for Cutter in this very city before Goddard scrapped the project, Kepler’s knife-to-a-gunfight smile, Alana’s steady hands, the bustling madness of the city and the clean efficiency of the Shatterdome, and about a nightmare he’s been having since she died, where he’s back on the _Hephaestus_ , looking out through the open airlock with the blackness rushing onto him like wind and seeing something coming toward them, some vast, terrible, sinister, indefinable shape, snaking through the vacuum of space like it’s water, and before he can get a good look at it he’s already trapped in its jaws, already crushed to a fine paste of blood and marrow and brain. The thing that hunts him in these dreams is not a kaiju, and it is not coming for him alone. It’s coming for _her_ , and he doesn’t know what this means, doesn’t know why it wants her, but he knows he has to stop it, before they’re both swallowed whole and forgotten, _here lie the remains of an unidentified Goddard employee, we tried to piece it back together but nobody had the clearance to touch its bones._

The scientist heading the jaeger project gives Lovelace a warm welcome, and Jacobi a skeptical once-over. “Doctor, this is my former colleague,” says the Captain smoothly, though she can’t quite gloss over the pause before _colleague_ , “he’s ex-military, MIT grad, Goddard special ops, explosives expert. Colonel Warren Kepler used to say his creations were like the Sistine Ceiling of weapons of mass destruction.”

“You make me sound like some kind of war criminal,” complains Jacobi, and lies through his teeth: “I’ve never done anything _technically_ illegal.”

“How comforting,” says the scientist dryly. Jacobi likes him; his clipped, no-nonsense manner, masking the type of insane genius required to create something as madly, absurdly perfect as the jaeger program, reminds him of Alana, the way she was before he got to know her and realized she was twice as smart and half as empathetic as she seemed. “Though I must remind you that the jaegers are not _bomb_. They are vessels. The program’s priority is saving lives, Mr. Jacobi, not ending them.”

Daniel Jacobi’s Deep Space Survival Tip #7: Smile, nod, agree. When high-ranking military personnel think their speeches aren’t having the desired effect, they get prickly and irritating.

Minkowski keeps her face impassive, but Jacobi can tell she’s not pleased with him. Lovelace shifts hers, ever so slightly, to raise an eyebrow at him, over the scientist’s shoulder.

“Contrary to popular belief,” says Jacobi, “I don’t have a death wish either, Doctor. You’d be surprised at what bad men can do when we’re backed into corners. The Captain here can attest to that.”

“No, I can’t,” says Lovelace, “but I will say he’s got a knack for operating dangerous machinery without getting killed,” and he owes her for _this_ , if nothing else, because there’s something in her voice that isn’t quite approval but something like it, and the scientist must hear it too, because he cracks a smile. Salutes Lovelace, and Minkowski.

“I’ll be in touch, Captain,” he says, tipping his head. “Commander. Jacobi.”

They watch him limp away and disappear into the back elevator. As soon as the doors close behind him Minkowski whirls on them both. “What are you doing?” she hisses. “Captain, I arranged this meeting for _you_ , I put my—”

“If you’re going to say you put your job on the line for me,” says Lovelace, her voice low and dry as ever, “don’t, because you didn’t. I’m a sure bet and I’ve never once let you down, Minkowski. Not once.”

Minkowski’s shoulders relax a little. “I know,” she says, softer, “I _know_ , that’s why I—never mind. But _he_ —”

“Is still in the room,” says Jacobi, “and has at least one working ear. So.”

“He needed a second chance,” says Lovelace, ignoring him, “and I thought—who are we not to give him one?”

“Oh, so now you’re a goddamn idealist?”

“Maybe I am! Maybe I just want to clean up some of the mess—”

“ _You_ are not responsible for what happened to them, Lovelace, if anyone’s indebted to him it’s _me_ , and you don’t see me running around—”

“Oh, _please_ —”

“Picking up every stray I come across, out of some misplaced sense of—”

“It’s not like I _adopted_ the guy, Christ—”

“Trying to get this piece of shit a _job_ , Lovelace, you’re not going to tell me that isn’t just a little bit pathetic—”

“No, but you’re building jaegers, aren’t you?” Lovelace leans her face in so it’s only a few inches away from Minkowski’s. The Commander, to her credit, does not back down. “Saving the whole world because you couldn’t save your crew? Couldn’t save them from the Listeners, couldn’t save them from the star, couldn’t even save them from a goddamn _chair_?”

Minkowski’s face has gone white. She says, “Be very, very careful, Captain.”

“Believe me,” says Lovelace, “I know what it’s like. I don’t blame you.” She pauses, flicks her eyes up and down Minkowski’s new uniform. “And I feel the same way, sometimes. I do. I just wonder why you’re so intent on doing it all alone.”

“ _I thought you were dead_ ,” says Minkowski, so low it’s barely audible, and then Jacobi knows it’s time to leave. He turns—unnoticed by the two women—and walks back through the cavernous space, pausing to take in each jaeger. The _Gypsy_ , the _Alpha_ , the _Supernova_ , the _Orion_. Feels a strange heaviness in him, something he can’t quite identify, as he tips his head back to see the gods in their entirety. _Maybe I just want to clean up the mess_.

Except, no, see—that’s _Jacobi’s_ job.

He’s a man who trades in disasters, in devastation, in red lines and breaking points and pushed limits. Just like Kepler never saw a good thing he couldn’t gamble away for the high of it, it’s been years— _decades_ , even, Jesus—since Jacobi was able to look at a building or a machine or a ship or a body or a person and not have that dark chamber in the back of his brain mapping out a dozen different ways to destroy it before anybody knew what hit them. Alana, she was the opposite; there was no knot she couldn’t unravel, no puzzle she couldn’t solve, no system she couldn’t infiltrate and twist to her design, but if Kepler decided that to simply _eliminate_ the problem would be faster, he’d bring in Jacobi, and whatever that problem was would cease to exist. For six whole years, Jacobi’s purpose was to make Goddard’s messes disappear.

And that was the crux of it, really: Daniel Jacobi, all that he is, all that he was ever meant to be, is a person who makes things into not-things. The way Goddard made people into not-people, and Kepler made not-people into ticking time bombs, and Alana made time bombs into assets, and Eiffel made assets into emergencies, and Lovelace made emergencies into rescue missions, and Minkowski made rescue missions into Russian roulette. Nothing ever stops, and nothing ever changes, except sometimes things that once existed _stop_ existing, and no one—not Cutter, not Pryce, not Hilbert, not the _Listeners_ —can change that. All Jacobi’s ever done is arrange those stopping points into particular patterns, patterns that would pave the way to a new and brighter future. A future, he thinks, that won’t need monsters to keep its engine running.

He has always known he would never be a resident of that future. He’d just imagined that Alana, at least, would make it there, would carry herself into brave new worlds with wiles and ruthlessness and cybernetic enhancements and God knew what else, and when the man Himself came to judge her at the pearly gates she’d smile up at him, that sweet scalpel smile. _What_ , she’d say, _didn’t you know you’ve already been replaced?_

 

The jaeger program takes them, because of course it does. Lovelace enters the ranger academy under Minkowski’s supervision, and Jacobi gets a tech position so unlike the one he held at Goddard or in the military it’s almost absurd: he’s designing weaponry meant to _prevent_ the flattening of cities, this time, and he takes the challenge in stride, tries to reverse-engineer his brain into something that cares more about the future of humanity than it does about living to see the next bomb go off. His dreams take a different turn: he relives the attack, now, instead of the mission, and sometimes Trespasser speaks to him in Kepler’s voice; other times it just growls, opens its mouth so Jacobi can see every one of its teeth, the black hole of its throat. Sometimes he blows away the wreckage of the bar to find Lovelace already dead. Sometimes _he’s_ dead, and Lovelace is standing over him, tapping her watch, saying: _I’m sorry, but you were just running down the clock_. Once the kaiju morphs into Alana and throws an arm around his shoulder, and he’s so shaken by this that he doesn’t sleep for another three days, spends his nights in the lab, slamming caffeine pills and building a whole new jaeger prototype from scratch.

It’s somewhere around the Vancouver attack that he caves and has Trespasser tattooed on his forearm, right underneath the shitty skull-and-bones he got when he was eighteen and stupid and wanted to piss off his dad in every way he could, and when Lovelace sees it—she comes by the lab one morning to borrow a tool; he’s working and his sleeves are rolled up—she looks like she wants to slap him across the face. “You really can’t help being an insensitive piece of shit, can you,” she says flatly, and somehow that’s worse, but he hasn’t cared about other people’s moral judgments of him since walking on the moon was worth a TV broadcast and he isn’t about to start now, so he just smirks at her, setting down his wrench. “I’m saving the world here, Ranger.”

She bristles at that. It’s been common knowledge for some months now that Lovelace, despite her record-setting simulated combat scores and obvious gift for manipulating jaeger tech, has not been able to match with anyone in the Drift—not even remotely. Jacobi’s heard through the gossip mill that the last copilot she tried passed out within seconds of making the handshake.

“You’re not going to join a kaiju death cult or something, are you?” she says. If she’s trying to get under his skin, it’s not going to work. “I mean, no one would be _surprised_ , but—”

“Don’t worry. I’m not the religious type.”

She rolls her eyes. “No shit.”

She must forgive him, though, for the dig and the tattoo, because a week later she comes by the lab again with an idea.

He’s just finished the prototype. It’s only about four feet tall, but it’s new and it’s strong and it’s got a neural interface that actually bypasses the secondary command line altogether, which allows it to be piloted by three people, not just two, its weaponry system is entirely nuclear-powered, virtually _impossible_ to hack, and if he can get the funding to actually build the thing it’ll change the whole fucking _game_. As soon as he sees her, he straightens. “Lovelace,” he says, “I want you to meet—”

“What if,” she says, and her eyes are very bright, her thin hands shaking a little in the way he knows means she’s pulled one of her crazy insomniac all-weekers, that she’s been downing caffeine or pain meds or something by the bucketful even though she _knows_ the effect it has on her biology, Goddamn her, “Jacobi, what if I could drift with a _kaiju_?”

 

  

 


End file.
